Franckenstein's Etonian Descendant

TAKI LE MAÎTRE

Bill Slips in Greece Leave it to the neo-Hellenes to disappoint and make a hero of Bill Clinton. For any of you unfamiliar with the term neo-Hellenes, they are the modern Greeks, the direct descendants of Leonidas, Pericles, Socrates and Aristophanes, er.....with a little bit of Mohamed and Ahmed (Turkish) blood thrown in for good (bad) measure.

The reason I am deeply disappointed in my countrymen is as follows: Here was an opportunity to show the Clintons, Bergers and Albrights of this world that although they managed to hoodwink the American public, their crimes in Serbia were not forgotten, nor were they about to be forgiven by an ancient people. It is now a fact that the Kosovo war was an utterly useless one, and that the West's bombing of Serbia was immoral, illegal, unnecessary and?most important of all?unsuccessful. Kosovo, as much a part of Serbia as Texas is part of the United States, has had 90 percent of its Serb population cleansed by the Albanians. The Serbian economy has been bombed back to the stone age, and it's calculated that it will take 20 years to get back to where it was on March 24. The chief casualty has not been Serbia?with 2000 dead and 8000 civilian wounded?but countries such as Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine. The senseless bombing of the Danube bridges has dammed up one of Europe's most essential economic arteries.

And there's much more. Undeniable evidence has emerged that leading up to March 24, 1999, the Serbs and Milosevic had bent over backwards to accommodate Albright and the Albanians, and that Serbia was ready to allow an international presence in Kosovo to implement any agreement. Albright insisted that NATO troops should be allowed instead to roam all over Serbia proper, exactly like an occupying power. In the previous 12 months before the bombing, 2000 people had died on both sides, and 90 villages in central and western Kosovo had been emptied of Serbs. Last but not least, the bombing provoked the bloodlust of the Serbian forces, and the Albanian ethnic cleansing that followed.

So, this was a bad war, incompetently and cruelly prosecuted by the Clinton-Blair gang. What many people in Europe would like to know is: How did we allow gangsters like Clinton and Blair to get away with so many lies and half-truths? Well, if I had the answer I'd tell you, but I don't. How does one stop an administration marked throughout for its vindictive mendacity from brainwashing the people? Again, dunno, but the messengers surely must have something to do with it. And yes, I mean the media and press of this great country of ours.

Last week George Szamuely wrote about the Times acting as a shill for Clinton. I say what about the rest? Clinton has persisted in his lies even after they have been exposed, yet the pundits have allowed the spinners tosmother the few voices who protested the lies. Instead, we have had a backlash against soi disant old-fashioned conservatism, "the emergence of religious dogmatists on the far right." In other words, lying under oath, bombing a sovereign country and killing thousands under false pretensions, consistently playing the race card, using the IRS as a political weapon against conservative groups?all of the above unacceptable and intolerable under any circumstances?are preferable if we are to protect our...sexual freedoms. The structure of American law and society may have been damaged by Clinton's recklessness in his private and public doings, but that is a small price to pay as long as the conservatives are kept at bay.

Clinton was in his element in Istanbul last week. There is nothing he likes more than to personalize a situation, whining about it in the same manner he used while bamboozling Arkansas voters. Addressing Boris Yeltsin he sought to justify his intercession over Chechnya by recalling Yeltsin's coup de theatre with the tank in 1991. (Yeltsin climbed on a tank and had his picture flashed around the world). "[O]ne of the most thrilling experiences of my life as a citizen of the world, before I became president, was when you stood up on that tank in Moscow when they tried to take the freedom of the Russian people away."

What bathos! What bullshit! How pathetic! A citizen of the world? Who does this clown think he's talking to? Ten-year-olds about his underwear? The Russian people have never not had their freedom taken away, now more than ever by the Russian mafia. Clinton went to war against Serbia, whose holiest province is Kosovo, but will not throw even a firecracker at Moscow, which has as much right to Chechnya as Hitler's Germany had on Czechoslovakia, probably less so. Why isn't Albright threatening? Why is it that Albanian heroin dealers' lives are more precious than Chechnyan women and children?

This one is easy to answer. Yeltsin has the bomb, and Milosevic didn't. Human rights end where might begins. That's what it's all about, sports fans, and don't let the Times and those blow-dried airhead types on television tell you different. We Greeks have had lots of experience with egregious liars and demagogues. We smelled out Clinton from the start. What a pity we had to go and blow it yet again. But the tear gas did clean up the polluted Athenian atmosphere for a while. It's probably the only good thing to ever come from a Clinton visit.